Targeting Common Factors Across Anxiety and Depression Using the Unified Protocol for the Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Adolescents

Clinical approaches to mood and anxiety disorders in children and adolescents have historically been confined to either diagnosis- [e.g., for obsessive–compulsive disorder vs. generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), etc.] or domain-specific (e.g., for anxiety disorders vs. depressive disorders) treatments. However, as conceptualizations of mental illness shift towards a more dimensional model [e.g., the recent Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) from the National Institutes of Health], transdiagnostic treatments, such as the unified protocol for the treatment of emotional disorders in adolescents (UP-A; Ehrenreich et al. in Child Fam Behav Ther 31(1):20–37, 2008), are gaining support in the empirical literature. This paper reviews the common treatment targets across three emotional disorders commonly found in adolescence: GAD, social anxiety disorder, and major depressive disorder. In particular, similarities and differences across potential treatment mechanisms, including cognitive and information processing deficits, problem-solving difficulties, and avoidance strategies are examined. Finally, the case of 17-year-old “Andrea” is presented to demonstrate how transdiagnostic approaches like the UP-A can be effective in treating a range of emotional disorders in youth.     

Graphic Somatography: Life Writing,Comics, and the Ethics of Care

This essay considers the ways in which graphic caregiving memoirs complicate the idealizing tendencies of ethics of care philosophy. The medium’s “capacious” layering of words, images, temporalities, and perspectives produces “productive tensions. . . The words and images entwine, but never synthesize” (Chute 2010, 5). In graphic memoirs about care, this “capaciousness” allows for quick oscillation between the rewards and struggles of care work, representing ambiguous, even ambivalent attitudes toward care. Graphic memoirs effectively represent multiple perspectives without synthesis, part of a structural and thematic ambivalence that provides a provocative counterpart to the abstract idealism of ethics of care philosophy.     

Intervening with Multiplication Fact Difficulties: Examining the Utility of the Instructional Hierarchy to Target Interventions

Examining the use of conceptual frameworks such as the instructional hierarchy (IH) to drive academic interventions represents an important area of inquiry in order to understand why an intervention was effective. However, to date, the IH has only been examined retroactively to explain the effectiveness of math interventions and has not been used to drive intervention implementation based on students’ needs. Therefore, the current study used a multiple baseline single-case design to examine the utility of the IH to determine an appropriately targeted acquisition (incremental rehearsal) or proficiency (timed drill) intervention for difficulties with multiplication facts. Students first received the contraindicated intervention (i.e., non-targeted) and then their correctly targeted intervention. Results showed that all students demonstrated greater fluency growth during their targeted intervention and that students in need of an acquisition intervention also demonstrated greater multiplication fact retention and growth rate during their targeted intervention. The utility of the IH as a heuristic to correctly target interventions based on students’ baseline skill levels is discussed.

     

Not too little, but not too much: The perceived desirability of responses to personality items

Paradigms typically employed to investigate socially desirable responding in personality assessment implicitly assume linear relationships exist between trait level and desirability but recent research has called this assumption into question. In this study, participants rated the desirability of a hypothetical applicant to one of four jobs on the basis of which five-point Likert-type scale option he/she selected when responding to personality items. Results generally indicated that the most extreme option, on the desirable side of the response scale, was rated as most desirable, but perceived desirability asymptotes with the penultimate option. The middle (neutral) option, however, was consistently regarded as being much less desirable. The occupational context also significantly moderated the patterns of desirability ratings for many items.     

Adolescent Self-Reports of Social Anxiety: Can They Disagree with Objective Psychophysiological Measures and Still Be Valid?

We examined self-reported and parent-reported adolescent social anxiety symptoms and objective baseline measures of psychophysiological flexibility in 62 families. Measures completed by 31 adolescents referred for a clinical screening evaluation for social anxiety were compared to an age- and gender-matched community control sample of 31 adolescents (total sample: age range 14 to 17?years; 22 boys and 40 girls; M?=?15.32?years; SD?=?1.1). Clinic referred adolescents reported significantly fewer social anxiety symptoms than parents reported about adolescents. Further, for all adolescents, self-reported social anxiety symptoms exhibited low correspondence with objective psychophysiological measures. Yet, both measures uniquely discriminated between adolescents on whether they were clinic referred for a social anxiety screening. Further, adolescent self-reported social anxiety symptoms exhibited high levels of internal consistency and convergent validity. Findings indicate that researchers and practitioners should refrain from using disagreements between adolescent self-reports and other measures (e.g., parent report, objective measures) as indicators of the veracity of adolescent self-reports.     

Rural breast cancer patients,coping and depressive symptoms: A prospective comparison study

Many studies have revealed that individual differences in coping responses to the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer are associated with psychological adjustment. The vast majority of these studies, however, focus exclusively on urban breast cancer survivors despite that rural breast cancer survivors are likely to have distinct experiences both in general and in relation to breast cancer. The current study quantitatively examined the coping strategies employed by both rural and urban breast cancer patients while they were undergoing radiation therapy. Further, the influence of these coping behaviours on concurrent as well as subsequent depressive symptoms (3 and 6 months later) was examined. The results revealed that the rurality of breast cancer patients was unrelated to the ways in which they coped, but did influence the relationships between some coping responses and depressive symptoms. Specifically, active coping and positive reinterpretation were negatively related to depressive symptoms for more rural breast cancer patients, but not their relatively urban counterparts. Similarly, behavioural disengagement was more strongly related to depressive symptoms for more rural patients. Possible reasons for this pattern of results and implications are discussed.     

Motivational pursuits in the context of human sexual relationships

The current article examines how close relationships combine with individual differences in sex motives (Cooper, Shapiro, & Powers, 1998) to shape sexual experience. We first provide an overview of the motivational approach as it relates to sexual behavior and then describe 2 broad mechanisms (1 transactional, the other interactional) by which motives and relational context combine to shape behavior. Drawing on our past research, we review evidence showing that people select relationship contexts based partly on their motives and that these contexts in turn shape future motives and behavior; that partner motives shape sexual experience above and beyond one's own motives; and that both the broader relationship context and partner motives moderate the effects of one's own motives on sexual experience. We conclude that the nature of motivational pursuits cannot be adequately understood in the abstract, but rather we must take into account the relational context in which one's needs are pursued.     

Women gaze behaviour in assessing female bodies: the effects of clothing,body size,own body composition and body satisfaction

Psychological Research - Often with minimally clothed figures depicting extreme body sizes, previous studies have shown women tend to gaze at evolutionary determinants of attractiveness when...